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Michael Moore Soft On Obama

While it’s undeniably a powerful film that everyone should see, I have one major complaint with it – he let Obama off the hook.

Everyone knows that Moore isn’t a big fan of Bush and Cheney. That has been very clear in his last couple of films. So it isn’t surprising that in Capitalism, he continues to (rightfully) blame a lot of America’s current financial woes on the Bush / Cheney administration.

However Bush isn’t in office today. And Moore’s only critique of Obama is to mention VERY briefly that Goldman Sachs were the biggest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. Apart from that slight jab, he not only completely let’s Obama off the hook for the current crisis, he actually continues to paint Obama in a positive light, as a beacon of hope that things are changing in the USA.

Now while I know Obama wasn’t in power during the years when the Clinton and Bush administrations whittled away most of the regulations in the financial system, it definitely WAS Obama who, late last year, convinced Congress to pass the bailout vote – a disastrous piece of legislation that Moore spent a great deal of time discussing. Yet in all of his coverage of that event, he never once showed an image of Obama or mentioned Obama’s critical role in making sure the bill passed.

And I have to ask – why not? I know that Moore championed hard for Obama on the election trail. But I thought that would make sure that he would have determined to hold his man to at least an equal if not higher standard than the other guys. It looks like I was wrong. At least in this film, Moore has given Obama a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It saddens me.

There’s a great scene in the film where Moore debunks Ronald Reagan and explains how RR was just a pretty boy frontman for the financial cartels. It’s sad that he can’t see that Obama is EXACTLY the same.

On another note, I hope that Moore’s next film shines a light on his own religion. He says he’s been a practising Catholic all of this life. In this current film, he makes the Catholics out to be good guys. I wonder if he has the integrity to turn his keen eye on his own? He could start by interviewing Irwin Zalkin.

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3 thoughts on “Michael Moore Soft On Obama”

“Moore debunks Ronald Reagan and explains how RR was just a pretty boy frontman for the financial cartels. It’s sad that he can’t see that Obama is EXACTLY the same.”

Exactly? You mean “exactly”? Surely not. Whatever I may think of Obama politically I have to concede that the guy has a modicum of moral headway over the Republicans. The problem is that he’s working within a broken system. We’ve got to change the system but in the meantime I reckon he’s the best of a bad bunch.

Charlie, I’m afraid you’ve bought into the mythology of “them” and “us”. That’s all part of the system. People are given the illusion of choice (them, us) to prevent them from realizing the elite are just screwing them over on a daily basis. While American’s continue to believe the illusion that “if we just vote the right person into office it’ll all be okay”, the elite will continue to get away with wholesale pillage. There is no way Obama would have got the job unless he was being supported by the elite. He wouldn’t have got the extensive media coverage he did unless they guys who own the media networks were happy to see him in office. And if the guys who own the big media companies like a candidate, that should set off ALL of your warning bells.

I completely agree that this liberal-capitalist democracy will never work. We’ve got to get rid of it. In delivering human happiness it is fundamentally flawed. To do that however we need to convert people, particularly people who exert influence under the current system. I think you’re wrong to assume that all members of “the elite” are the same. Some of them are far closer to your way of thinking than others.

What exactly is your strategy for overthrowing the system? Armed struggle or force of argument? If it’s armed struggle then good luck to you. If it’s force of argument then you have to afford your opponents a degree of respect as well as be able to recognise areas of common ground where they exist.